The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America

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Harvard University Press, 2004 - 374 pages

As the 2000 census resoundingly demonstrated, the Anglo-Protestant ethnic core of the United States has all but dissolved. In a country founded and settled by their ancestors, British Protestants now make up less than a fifth of the population. This demographic shift has spawned a "culture war" within white America. While liberals seek to diversify society toward a cosmopolitan endpoint, some conservatives strive to maintain an American ethno-national identity. Eric Kaufmann traces the roots of this culture war from the rise of WASP America after the Revolution to its fall in the 1960s, when social institutions finally began to reflect the nation's ethnic composition.

Kaufmann begins his account shortly after independence, when white Protestants with an Anglo-Saxon myth of descent established themselves as the dominant American ethnic group. But from the late 1890s to the 1930s, liberal and cosmopolitan ideological currents within white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America mounted a powerful challenge to WASP hegemony. This struggle against ethnic dominance was mounted not by subaltern immigrant groups but by Anglo-Saxon reformers, notably Jane Addams and John Dewey. It gathered social force by the 1920s, struggling against WASP dominance and achieving institutional breakthrough in the late 1960s, when America truly began to integrate ethnic minorities into mainstream culture.

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Contents

Introduction
1
The WASP Ascendancy
9
The Rise of AngloAmerica
11
Limited Liberals DoubleConsciousness in AngloAmerican Thought 17501920
37
Conservative Egalitarians The Progressive Mind in the Nineteenth Century
58
The Cosmopolitan Vanguard 19001939
83
Pioneers of Equality The Liberal Progressives
85
Cosmopolitan Clerics The Role of Ecumenical Protestantism
111
The Decline of AngloAmerica
207
Cultural Modernization Making Sense of AngloAmericas Demise
244
American Whiteness Dominant Ethnicity Resurgent?
258
Liberal Ethnicity and Cultural Revival A New Paradigm
283
Conclusion
305
Notes
315
References
329
Acknowledgments
363

Expressive Pathfinders The New York Modernists
144
The Fall of AngloAmerica
175
Cosmopolitanism Institutionalized 19301970
177

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About the author (2004)

Eric P. Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at Birkbeck, University of London.

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